


under the wire (all that we've been through)

by tomatocages (kittu9)



Category: Marvel Avengers Movies Universe, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Bargaining, Courtship, F/M, Gen, Road Trips, Secret Identity, Secret Relationship, Secrets, Spies & Secret Agents, World Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-15
Updated: 2012-09-15
Packaged: 2017-11-14 06:14:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 484
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/512190
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kittu9/pseuds/tomatocages
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Tell me what to do to get to you.</i>
</p><p> </p><p>Clint and Natasha, around the world and after.</p>
            </blockquote>





	under the wire (all that we've been through)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [irishmizzy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/irishmizzy/gifts).



> For irishmizzy and the prompt _I’m always saving and you’re always owing and I’m tired of asking to settle the debt._

You have not made me suffer, merely wait. - Pablo Neruda, "You Would Come."

 

In Kyoto, he sends her flowers. She’s in Norway by the time the courier brings them to her hotel, and the concierge steals them to give to his wife. Clint knows, because he dresses as a courier and breaks into the delivery van every time he sends Tasha flowers, and then hangs around to see what happens when they arrive and she’s not there. 

She steals his wallet in Istanbul, which would just fucking figure, and he has to call his handler for a ride back to base. Clint doesn’t appreciate feeling fourteen and green, but Tasha doesn’t believe in letting success get to his head, so: they’re at an impasse. Like they were ever going to walk away from each other. 

It takes an alien invasion for her to look twice at him again, but after the battle’s over, after Clint has filed every incident report he can find and they ship Thor’s dipshit younger brother back home, after they get in the car, Tasha puts her hand on the gearshift and says, without looking at him, “You can have fifteen minutes.”

“Fuck that,” Clint says. “I don’t want fifteen minutes.” He’s hungover from staring at a ream of paperwork and not thinking about his nebulous kill count. “We’re off the clock, be original for once in your goddamn life.”

Tasha looks him right in the eye then, and he can see that little flick of her lashes that means he’s caught her off guard. Well, Clint is too tired to be funny and she probably won’t concuss him after the week they’ve had, even if she deserves to. 

“I could eat,” is all she says. 

In the end: they drive cross-country and get donuts from a drive-thru where Tasha once inoculated Stark against a bad case of self-destruction (“You owe him a booster shot,” Clint says around a mouthful of fritter. She steals the last bite right out of his mouth, as if the gesture means something). 

They part ways and meet again in Africa, on the Cape of Good Hope, six weeks into the off-season. The beach is teeming with jackass penguins and Tasha, draped in local textiles and posing as a Dutch genealogist, looks utterly unlike herself—in Clint’s experience, this is a good sign, a sign that Tasha is unshakably on her game. They have drinks, once, the way spies do in overwrought period films: Clint slouches at the bar and nurses a beer, Tasha sits primly at a table to his back, sipping a cocktail with too much fruit in it. Back to back like this, Clint can’t even catch a glimpse of her in the bar mirror, but he can feel her proximity prickling up and down his spine. It feels something like being caught and released; it feel exquisitely like being left intact.


End file.
